February 11, 1999
Commentary
Cheer Up, Conservatives!
By Francis Fukuyama, a professor of public policy at George Mason University. His book "The Great Disruption" will be published by Free Press in June.
.... Conservatives' unease over recent positive trends is understandable, since they don't want people to get complacent. Good economic times appear to have inclined many Americans to give President Clinton a pass on his various transgressions; it would be a far more serious development if positive social trends led them to conclude that welfare dependency, family breakdown and crime were issues that no longer needed to be addressed. And indeed, we should not kid ourselves that these problems have been solved.
Quite apart from social statistics, there is good reason to believe that society has begun a process of "remoralizing" itself and walking back from the cultural abyss it faced. Rather than deny these trends, conservatives should embrace them and claim credit, since they are in many ways responsible for a major shift in the culture.
But they should also be realistic about why moral values changed the way they did, and what we can expect for the future. This was not just a matter of the 1960s counterculture; changes in values were also driven by technological and economic factors that are products of the capitalist economy conservatives celebrate.
Moral decline is not a myth, or a matter of nostalgia, but rather something we can document empirically. Beginning in about 1965, a number of indicators of social dysfunction, including crime, welfare dependency, divorce, illegitimacy and drug use, began to skyrocket. Social trust in both government and fellow citizens, as measured by survey data, began a long, 30-year decline, and society appeared to be atomizing into a collection of individuals with few community ties.
Liberals at first denied the reality of these trends. Then, when they couldn't be denied, liberals started moving the goal posts in a process Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan labeled "defining deviancy down." By the 1990s, conservatives had won their first and perhaps most important victory, convincing people that something bad had in fact happened to American society in the intervening years.
.....One can accept that moral decline is a reality, and yet see it as the product of something other than a sudden, unexplainable loss of values. The most important shifts had to do with norms concerning sex and the family. Their rapid change is linked to two broad technological developments that began in the 1960s: drastic improvements in birth control, and the shift from physical to mental labor as economies evolved from industrial to information-based ones.
The traditional nuclear family was based on a bargain that traded the husband's income for the wife's fertility. With the transition to service-based economies and the decline of manufacturing, female labor-force participation rose rapidly across the West after the 1950s. This undid the old bargain and freed many men from responsibility for their families; not surprisingly, female labor-force participation correlates strongly with divorce and family breakdown throughout the Western world. The Pill reinforced this trend by shifting responsibility for the consequences of sex from men to women, as evidenced by the parallel decline in shotgun weddings. Since fathers are by nature more weakly attached to their children than mothers, many men took advantage of these changes to avoid responsibility for wives and children.
Since changes in moral norms were heavily influenced by broad technological and economic forces, some values are very unlikely to return in their old form. The nuclear family in particular is never going to recover fully the integrity it had during the 1950s, unless someone can figure out how to uninvent birth control or force women out of the workplace.
This does not mean, however, that we cannot adjust our behavior to these new conditions in ways that greatly mitigate the social disorder of the past generation. The question is, what form will this adjustment take? Those who believe that the cause of moral breakdown is the loss of religious values feel that the only solution is a revival, a massive new Great Awakening that purges the society of its sins. Since this has not happened, conservatives are discouraged and not inclined to take good news about social trends seriously.
I believe that religion is playing an important role in remoralizing contemporary societies. But a massive new revival of religious orthodoxy seems unlikely. Americans want the fruits of orthodoxy--social order--but they are not remotely willing to pay the price in terms of personal freedom. And religion would have to fly against strong economic head winds.
Moreover, remoralization can take forms other than religious ones. Conservatives often tend to underestimate the innate human ability to generate reasonable moral rules for themselves in an evolutionary manner. Western societies underwent an enormous shock as the entire nature of sex and family life shifted, and it is not surprising that it has taken society a while to adjust.
There are plenty of signs that that adjustment is occurring, and that conservative social values have made a big comeback. Important changes have occurred on the level of ideas. When the 1965 Moynihan report suggested that collapsing family structure in the black community played some role in creating poverty, respectable opinion denounced the author for "blaming the victim." By the 1990s, expert opinion had shifted almost completely in Mr. Moynihan's favor, and on a popular level most people came to agree with Barbara Dafoe Whitehead that "Dan Quayle Was Right" in promoting the virtues of two-parent families.
Remoralization can take many forms. Let me give one small example. Women--and this includes all the conservative women I know--have little interest in going back to a world in which their lives revolve exclusively around the family. But as Danielle Crittenden has recently suggested, it is possible for cultural norms to shift in favor of mothers choosing to stay at home while their children are young rather than giving them up to semiliterate baby-sitters. Indeed, I see signs all around me that this has already started to happen among the well-to-do; in another generation, it may only be the poor who don't have the luxury to leave work for a period to raise young children full-time.
I too share the concern that overoptimism about our social condition will lead to complacency. Cultural norms never really change spontaneously: they evolve only as the result of constant argument, analysis and "culture wars" that leave many victims in its wake. But conservatives should be proud of their role in this fight, and take some credit for their success.
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